Sun Goes Into Cooling 'Lockdown' -- Greta Thunberg Hardest Hit

 
Article by Bryan Preston in "PJMedia":

The New York Post reports that the big, flaming ball in the sky is about to go into “lockdown” just like the rest of us.

The sun is currently in a period of “solar minimum,” meaning activity on its surface has fallen dramatically.
Experts believe we are about to enter the deepest period of sunshine “recession” ever recorded as sunspots have virtually disappeared.
Astronomer Dr. Tony Phillips said: “Solar Minimum is underway and it’s a deep one.”
“Sunspot counts suggest it is one of the deepest of the past century. The sun’s magnetic field has become weak, allowing extra cosmic rays into the solar system.”

Reached for comment, 17-year-old global warming scold Greta Thunberg had but one thing to say to the cooling sun that may render her global warming activism obsolete:

 

The sun’s cooling ought to offset the alleged warming the earth has experienced over the past decade or century. In addition to (hopefully) muting global warming zealots for a while, it may cause 2020 to be the most memorable blur of a year in a long time. The last major sunspot minimum, the Maunder Minimum, ushered in a “little ice age.”

During the Maunder Minimum, temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere declined, relative to twentieth-century averages, by about one degree Celsius. That may not sound like much – especially in a year that is, globally, still more than one degree Celsius hotter than those same averages – but consider: seventeenth-century cooling was sufficient to contribute to a global crisis that destabilized one society after another. As growing seasons shortened, food shortages spread, economies unraveled, and rebellions and revolutions were quick to follow. Cooling was not always the primary cause for contemporary disasters, but it often played an important role in exacerbating them.

So we may have that to look forward to. 2020 continues to do everything but mess around.

But.

I’m old enough to remember when our science classes taught us that an ice age, thanks to the things they blame on global warming now, was inevitable. So, maybe the solar minimum gets offset by global warming. Add a little, subtract a little. If that’s the case, we should feel precisely no effects.

We could set about to burn more oil to warm things up if we need to. We have a glut of it now with storage filling up and it is as cheap as we’ll probably ever see it.

Aliens observing the sun over a long time span would note variations in its output. But its sunspot behavior and role in the earth’s climate remain poorly understood. There are few funds and no politics to be gained in proving or disproving its impact on climate. It has only been known to be a variable star for about 50 years, which is not a lot of time to study its effects on something as complex as planetary climate.

Like the COVID-19 models, scientists’ expectations for this solar cycle may be off. In 2010-11 they expected a powerful and disruptive solar maximum. We could have suffered solar storms that could have flaked with our electrical grid and communications. Instead, we got a solar max that was a little late and it came in and out with a whimper, not a bang.

Tellingly…

The polar fields have been slowly reversing at this maximum, Hathaway said, suggesting that they are not going get much stronger during Cycle 24. This also sets the stage for an even smaller maximum during Cycle 25, scientists believe.
“We’re seeing fields that suggest the next sun cycle will be even weaker than this one,” Hathaway said.

They don’t really know what to expect, and that’s fine. It’s science, unsettled, the way it’s supposed to be.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2020/05/15/sun-goes-into-cooling-lockdown-greta-thunberg-hardest-hit-n395711